But Crispin Sartwell argues in this quick immersion that classic reflections from around the world about the nature of beauty can enhance and deepen our pleasures, opening us to the world and one another. It is difficult, and maybe unnecessary, to figure out what it is. They are highly readable, but they are also profound reflections on the subjects that will draw many of us into deeper ponderings about the meaning of life, or, more to the point, the meaning of our lives.A perfect blossom and a sunset replete with color, Bob Marley and Marilyn Monroe, the middle of the wilderness or of an urban festival, your favorite song, your favorite shoes: people continue to find beauty everywhere, even as it is also entwined with many social problems and hierarchies. These essays reflect some of his best writing from the past fifteen years. Yet, there is a lightness to his world that is irreverent, fun, and entertaining. Through television appearances, journalism, and blogging, along with his numerous scholarly books, he has made a reputation as a thinker of serious thoughts. He has risen into the public consciousness in the last two decades due to his controversial views on social, political, and cultural subjects.

'Crispin Sartwell is the most important philosophical voice of his generation. And though Sartwell swaggers, provokes, and sometimes infuriates, he does so with a tacit humility and self-scrutiny, which empowers readers to follow his example and convert their own rage into beauty. His writing-crystalline, vivid, and intoxicating-is an uncontrollable substance. Sartwell is also, in my opinion, the best philosophical prose stylist of his generation.

He uses his significant erudition not to escape the ordinary or himself, but rather to let loose riches-of insight, suffering, and beauty-through a relentless examination of life, culture, and reality.

Like the American 'cynics' he loves-Twain, Bierce, Mencken-he is fiercely individualistic, deeply antiauthoritarian, and slavishly aligned with no creed or academic discipline. 'Crispin Sartwell deserves to be recognized as the heir to a distinctively American intellectual legacy. 'Each essay in How to Escape is a personal, opinionated think piece, underpinned by philosophical debate and theory, and the collection builds in energy and intensity, as the subject matter becomes more serious, indeed at times more disturbing … How to Escape is a fine piece of provocation.

Against the State by Crispin Sartwell